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inkle / ink

inkle's open source scripting language for writing interactive narrative.
http://www.inklestudios.com/ink
MIT License
4.11k stars 491 forks source link

Please Improve Inky Editor Accessibility #303

Open BlindHunter95 opened 7 years ago

BlindHunter95 commented 7 years ago

The Inky editor is almost accessible with screen readers, however there are some major problems: 1) None of the code can be read in the edit field. 2) The links (that is, outside of the play panel), are unlabeled. The links in the play panel are perfectly labeled. 3) For some reason, text printed in the play panel is not spaced, E.G. The screen reader reads it as all one word. If the Inky editor cannot be made accessible, a stand-alone command line Ink compiler would be appreciated.

joethephish commented 7 years ago

Sorry to hear that these things aren't working in Inky! To expand on some of your points if anyone wants to look into it:

  1. Our edit area uses the ace code editor. Do you know if ace works anywhere else, or is it just in Inky?
  2. Sorry, which links do you mean exactly? Just any buttons in the UI?
  3. Hmm, this is probably because each word in the play panel has an individual <span> so that they can be alt-clicked to jump back into the edit pane. Not sure why the spaces are removed when using a screen reader.

We do indeed have a command line compiler, and it was what we built first! See here.

BlindHunter95 commented 7 years ago
  1. Yes, ACE itself is inaccessible. For example, there's this issue on the main ACE repo.
  2. Yes, all of the links and such in the main UI are unlabeled.
tangela19 commented 3 years ago

As per the linked issue on Ace, apparently the ace editor has become somewhat more accessible, but inky is still all but unusable. Not sure why this would be, but I would love to see improvements made here.

scbaker commented 3 years ago

@joethephish, are there any updates on this?

I am using the most recent version and still running into at least two issues:

  1. I am unable to navigate through Inklewriter at all using the keyboard (a basic accessibility tenet), at least on Windows. The client starts you in the code editor and you can't switch out of it short of alt-tab or closing the program with alt-f4. Tab (the normal way to move between areas of a program) just indents lines of code.

  2. NVDA, a popular screen reader software, runs into pretty significant issues inside Inklewriter, per this Loom recording:

https://www.loom.com/share/4bcd875788c9452c90f46808f49a6fda

I'm not enough of an NVDA expert to know what's going on with it or why this is so weird. Sometimes it read things when I hovered over them (as expected), other times it didn't seem to recognize I had hovered over it at all. The other time I tried before the recording it just said "Blank blank" and quit.

Outputted Ink code also seems to be completely inaccessible to screenreader and keyboard users, unfortunately, but I will file a separate ticket for that as it's a different issue that (I think!) has a clearer resolution.

I am asking specifically because I have been writing an Ink game to be distributed as an Open Educational Resource and writing about the process of creating learning games using Ink, and would like to be able to let people know how accessible the software and its output is, since many of the people reading/interested in that specific topic will work in higher education, where there are legal requirements about accessibility that need to be followed.

Thank you! :)

joethephish commented 3 years ago

Apologies for this. We'd be more than happy to accept pull requests to improve these things! Feel free to lobby our active community on Discord